Day: September 1, 2006

It’s a slow Friday before a holiday weekend. Tomorrow will bring Elvis Costello with Marian McPartland at Tanglewood; Sunday and Monday some more kitchen demolition; Tuesday is back to the working week. So I’ve been catching my breath and organizing a few things.

I’ve been plagued by intermittent stuttering in iTunes playback on my work machine. Until today I lived with it, figuring it was just a bug or a problem with my machine. But today on a hunch I Googled the problem and found what appears to be the fix: switching to “Safe mode (waveout only)” in the Audio tab of the QuickTime preferences. This fix for stuttering iTunes for Windows playback comes courtesy of Technovia, where the comments also have some more advanced things to try, including the DMA settings on the hard drive.

I should note one caution: in my tests, I didn’t close iTunes before I changed the setting. After changing the setting, iTunes finished playing the song and then closed abruptly. After reopening, it has been stutter-free. I would suggest closing iTunes first as a general rule.

Funny what happens when you’re out of the country for a week. I totally missed Donald Rumsfeld going off the deep end and claiming that critics of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war were propping up fascism. Huh?

It’s a type of criticism we’ve heard from this administration and its toadies before: we must live in fear. We must not question the president, regardless of the evidence; to do so is treasonous. It’s the same message that got a pass from the American people for the last five years.

How astonishing, then, that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was able to turn Rumsfeld’s syllogism around on him, comparing Bush’s government to Neville Chamberlain’s in their certainty of their command of the situation and impugning the integrity of their chief critic, Winston Churchill. It’s six and a half minutes of some of the finest display of journalistic integrity and courage since Edward R. Murrow, whom Olbermann invokes to good effect:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.